Looking to build a motorized POV display, UncleBone made use of a certain rotary mechanism he already had on hand –

Seeing so many persistence of vision ideas on the web was too tempting not to try one. After considering several different motors to drive a display, a ceiling fan seemed to run at just the right speed, is out of the way, and very quiet compared with alternatives. With a micro controller based on the Arduino, this project provided plenty of both software and hardware learning and besides, the kids were involved throughout…

PCB, souce code, plus the Excel doc used to generate the display sequences are all available on Step 12 of the project’s instructable.